Sarah vs the Third Time
by Notorious JMG
Summary: Sarah loves Chuck, that much she knows - but not much else. Just how long will it take for her to regain all her memories?
1. Sarah vs the Helicopter

As it turned out, the kiss on the beach hadn't exactly been the magical Disney fairy tale kiss that Morgan had been hoping for. Now, don't get me wrong, it was still pretty magical. It truly did confirm the feelings that had been creeping back into my heart. I love Chuck Bartowski, I really do – I just still don't entirely know why. I mean, yes, mentally I know why – the DVD that Maj- COLONEL Casey gave me saw to that. But the two haven't connected yet.

I guess you could say that even though Quinn wiped my memories, there was something inside that he couldn't take away. If I believed in God, I guess I would call it my soul. As it is, Ellie thinks that there was just an unbreakable part of my personality that was irrevocably changed by Chuck over the last five years, and nothing the Intersect could do was going to change that. Morgan, of course, embracing his inner teenage girl as he does –

How did I know that?

I'll get back to that in a moment. Anyway, as Morgan does, he's ever the closet romantic, and he's convinced that when I said my vows to Chuck, "for better or for worse", it permanently changed something about reality, and now reality won't let me fall OUT of love with Chuck.

It's a ludicrous explanation, sure, but deep down, I kinda like it.

Anyway. So, about me knowing that about Morgan. Though we have no idea what Quinn ACTUALLY did to me, and since not even General Beckman can access the Intersect files at this point (basically, if there's more than one degree of separation between you and President Obama, you can forget about it), we have no way of knowing exactly WHY my memories are returning piecemeal. Ellie again has this theory that what Quinn did was suppress my memory, and little by little, the suppression is wearing off – like an amnesia patient slowly regaining their memories. I guess my knowledge of Morgan is just one of those things.

But there are specific memories that come back at certain times, due to certain stimuli. Like when Chuck and I were at the Wienerlicious in Berlin, and I started rearranging the counter. Or when I brought up Irene DeMova as we were staring death in the face. And later, when I actually think about those things, I can actually remember the original events. I actually remember now that night at the Wilshire Plaza when Chuck defused the bomb just before it blew up General Stanfield.

Then there was what happened today.

I was in the kitchen at our apartment – and yes, I've moved back in with Chuck; he's sleeping on the couch for the moment, and even though I told him he didn't have to, he insisted, for which, realistically, I was grateful, because I'm still adjusting to the situation – and all of a sudden, I was overwhelmed with the urge to make a chocolate soufflé. I had no idea why. I can't ever remember having made a soufflé before.

So I made the soufflé. Chuck brought home dinner, and I brought out the soufflé for dessert.

As I did so, he started to smile. "You're not trying to poison me, are you?" he asked, a note of humor in his voice.

"No, Chuck, I'm not," I replied, "but if you drown this soufflé, I might consider it."

That was when his smile turned into utterly joyous laughter. He jumped out of his chair, hugged me almost uncomfortably tightly, swung me around in a circle, and kissed me. Admittedly, I was taken aback by this show of emotions, but it wasn't unwelcome. The happier he is, the happier I am, even if it's just from emotional transference.

I didn't understand at first, though. "What's gotten into you, Chuck?" I asked, amused.

That's when I realized. I remembered. I remembered the night, about a week after I met Chuck, when he thought I was trying to poison him, and I thought John Casey was trying to kill him. Unconsciously, I started smiling too, and knowing how happy it would make him, I looked Chuck square in the eyes and said, "Better be careful, lest Casey show up with microtracker-infested mini-quiches."

If you can show me somebody who smiles with more joy and happiness than Chuck did at that moment, I'll give you my Porsche.


	2. Sarah vs the Tango

_**Author's note: **__Time to be self-promoting. It's nomination time for the final Awesome Awards. If you wouldn't mind, please go to the forum (http : / forum . fanfiction . net / forum / TWoP _ Kicked _ Us _ Out _ But _ We _ Still _ Love _ Chuck / 49974 / - make sure you remove all the spaces) and nominate my story _Chuck vs. the Fake Empire_ for the appropriate awards, including the John Casey Award for Best Alternate Universe Story and the Bryce Larkin Award for Best Crossover Story. I'm eligible for other awards, but for those, nominate as you will.  
>As far as this story goes… enjoy!<em>

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><p>It's been over a month now since I was captured by Nicholas Quinn and my memory was suppressed. A few memories have returned since then, but before today, it had been nearly two weeks since the last time a clearly identifiable memory came back.<p>

That particular memory was not long after I became Chuck's handler. A physician named Jonas Zarnow had attempted to steal the Intersect on behalf of North Korea, and while so doing, set both me and Maj – dammit, COLONEL Casey up to make it look like we were trying to kill Chuck. While that was all going on, Ellie had invited me over for dinner, and I came with a CIA-prepared soufflé, which Chuck then proceeded to murder.

Anyway, that came back while I was baking the other day, and Chuck was pretty much ecstatic. I'm sure he would've been equally ecstatic about me remembering Irene DeMova if he hadn't been trying to defuse a bomb that was set to blow the Pacific Concert Hall into oblivion.

But back to the topic at hand – today. Like I said, it's been over a month since the whole thing with Quinn went down. Since the end of our last mission, however, I've been trying to get comfortable with Chuck again. I haven't really driven anywhere in that time, but yesterday afternoon, I for some reason very much wanted to take my Porsche for a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway.

So I asked Chuck where it was. I knew it wasn't a good sign when he went pale and gulped, but then when he told me that that Brazilian son of a bitch Augusto Gaez had blown it up (and nearly blown Carina up with it!), I saw red.

Fortunately, Chuck very literally knows me better than I know myself, and was able to calm me down relatively quickly. Then, he promised he would take me to Torrance so I could buy a new Porsche. "We've got a lot of money from selling the Buy More to Subway," he told me. "Plus, the government finally unfroze our accounts, so I think we can spare a hundred grand for a 911."

Well, we were down in the South Bay, test-driving a 911. The dealership had put a CD of what they called "mood music" in for the test drive, and as we were driving up the PCH, a song that sounded very familiar came on.

"Chuck," I said, "do you know what song this is?"

He listened for a moment and frowned. "You know, vaguely," he replied, "but I couldn't tell you what it is. Give me a minute…"

Chuck dug out his iPhone, then activated an app on it. The app listened for a moment, and then Siri (which, by the way, CREEPY) spoke.

"The song you are listening to is called 'Santa Maria', by the Gotan Project," Chuck's phone said.

Chuck turned and looked at me. "Doesn't strike me as your type of music," he said. "But then, nothing really does –"

"La Ciudad!"

Chuck raised his eyebrows. "I beg your pardon?"

I pulled the car over to the side of the road, and then turned and looked at him. "La Ciudad!" I said again. "That skank that you tangoed with at the art auction, the one who tried to kill you!"

"That's right," Chuck breathed, recognition dawning. "That's right, I learned the tango from Devon, and he taught me the women's part!" Then, he got a curious look on his face. "'That skank'?"

I smiled and shrugged. "What can I say, she messed with my man."


	3. Sarah vs the Wookie

_**Author's note:**__ My stories and I are up for quite a few Awesome Awards. Vote for them if you so desire, but if I have to ask you to vote for one, it's the JEFFSTER! Award for lifetime achievement. Given the amount of work I've put in over the last four years – both on stories and on our discussion forum here – I would really like to receive that sort of recognition from my peers. http : / forum . fanfiction . net / forum / TWoP _ Kicked _ Us _ Out _ But _ We _ Still _ Love _ Chuck / 49974 / - make sure you remove all the spaces.  
>Enjoy!<em>

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><p>I had the oddest dream last night. Well, odd might not be a good way of putting it. Disturbing. Horrifying. Mind-breaking.<p>

What was even worse was that when I woke up and went searching for proof that it was JUST a dream, it was instead confirmed to be a suppressed memory coming back to the surface.

Contents of this dream, you ask? Well, I dreamed that I walked into this hotel room. I walked into the hotel room to find John Casey, stripped to his t-shirts and shamrock boxers, handcuffed to the bed. And then, of ALL THINGS, I took a picture with my iPhone.

Now, in any other situation, that could've just been passed off as a nightmare. But when I woke up, I was flooded with a series of memories from what seemed to be the same mission, not the worst of which was the one where the principal from _Glee_ had a giant golden gun to Chuck's head.

(Okay, so it turned out it wasn't actually Mr. Figgins. It was just a really hairy guy who looked like him. And I don't want to hear it about the CIA's tough-as-nails Sarah Walker watching _Glee_, either. I watched crap like _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ and _My So-Called Life_ back in the day. Not to mention I watched a lot of Nick at Nite back in the 90s. Shut up.)

Anyway. So I got out my iPhone, and looked back through my old, old pictures (it turns out this is my sixth iPhone since I got to L.A.; fortunately, it seems that Chuck was able to transfer my pictures each time), and sure enough, there was the picture I saw myself taking.

Ew.

Well, Carina had popped up quite a bit in these memories, so I gave her a call, and we got to talking about the mission. It turned out that she hadn't heard anything about my memory issues, and she got pissed and threatened to kill Nicholas Quinn.

She was mollified when I told her I had already taken care of that loose end.

Carina told me that we should meet up for coffee this afternoon, and she could fill me in on some of the details from that mission – those that my memory had not refreshed.

So we met, and the first thing out of her mouth was, "So, with no memories, are you and Chuck still together?"

The reply that automatically popped out of mine was, "He's mine, you know that, back off."

Surprising. I have absolutely no memory of Carina and Chuck interacting, yet the moment she even jokes about making a move on him, I get my back up, as if there was an undercurrent of something there.

"Don't worry about it," Carina told me later. "I would never make a move on Chuck – heck, I wanted to, that first mission, even tried. He turned me down, and then…"

She paused for a moment, and smiled. "Well, I just couldn't."

"Why not?" I asked with a frown. "From my understanding of the way things went, Chuck and I didn't get together for… well… more than two years after this mission."

"Oh, Sarah," Carina said, laughing and shaking her head. "Are you kidding? The way you looked at him back then, you were already head over heels for him."

I scoffed. "Come on, Carina, I was just his han-"

And I stopped. Because that was when I realized, she was absolutely right.


	4. Sarah vs the Sizzling Shrimp

So I've been thinking a lot lately about what Carina told me when she came to visit – about how I had clearly fallen in love with Chuck barely a month into my mission in Los Angeles. At first, it made no sense at all – how could I, the super-operative from the CIA, have gotten so easily screwed up?

Then, when I thought about it some more, it made complete sense, at least in the context of just how I managed to find myself in love with Chuck again, despite having no memories.

With that in mind, I thought it might not be a bad idea to talk to the other people who knew both me and Chuck well, and see what observations they had. I decided that my first stop needed to be the person who had been Chuck's friend the longest, and who had been the most wary of me since Quinn had wiped my memory:

Morgan Grimes.

I called Morgan up, and asked him if he'd like to meet me for lunch. "Sure," he said, "as long as you're not planning on trying to kill me."

I could tell he meant it as a joke, but the tone in his voice made it fall flat. "Morgan, you have my most sincere promise," I told him. "Your life is perfectly safe in my hands."

Well, Morgan agreed to meet me at the Phoenix Inn in Chinatown at 12:30 that afternoon. I arrived at 12:15 – just by habit. I felt like I needed to make sure the area was secure.

Morgan arrived just as the server came to the table to take our orders. Turning to the server, I let loose with a rapid-fire flurry of Cantonese. He smiled and nodded, then walked away as I turned back to Morgan, who was now looking at me with a confused look on his face.

"Ooookay," he said slowly. "So, the only words I recognized in all of that were 'Diet Coke' and 'grape Fanta'. Care to fill me in?"

I arched an eyebrow and stared at Morgan. "Good to see you too, Morgan," I said, a note of mock irritation creeping into my voice as I fought to keep a smile off of my face. "I've been well, thanks for asking."

"Oh, gosh, sorry," he sighed. "I… I'm sorry, Sarah, I'm just a little nervous around you. I don't know if you're gonna go all super-spy on me –"

"Morgan," I interrupted him, "you'll be fine. I'm not going to hurt Chuck's best friend."

He relaxed a little, but I could see he was still tense, so I figured I'd tell him why I was speaking in a Chinese dialect. "As far as what I said, I was just telling him our orders. General Tso chicken and Diet Coke for me, sizzling shrimp and grape Fanta for you. And yeah, maybe I was showing off a li- Morgan?"

Morgan had gone pale and was staring at me. "Morgan, what's wrong?"

"It worked," he whispered. "It worked!"

I frowned. "What worked?"

The stunned look on Morgan's face was slowly being replaced by a giddy smile. "The kiss!" he exclaimed. "When Chuck kissed you on the beach, it worked!"

"Oh, Morgan," I sighed. "I hate to disappoint you, but it didn't work. I mean –"

"Who told you that I liked sizzling shrimp?"

"Uh…" I thought for a moment. Surely Chuck must've… nope, I could not for the life of me…

And yet, I remembered distinctly a mission that involved this very restaurant, which resulted in Chuck convincing a Chinese spy to defect to the United States…

I looked back at Morgan. "Memories have been coming back to me bit by bit, Morgan," I said to him. "I guess that just happened to be one."

Morgan nodded and smirked. "Didn't work, my ass."


	5. Sarah vs the Sandworm

It had been some time since any part of my memory had come back. Months, in fact. And it was getting frustrating – here I was, I had remembered the first couple of months after I met Chuck, but then two thirds of a year had gone by, and I had remembered nothing more.

Chuck and I had talked about it at length. I had called Ellie Woodcomb who – after I had apologized profusely for taking her hostage – told me that the brain is a tricky, tricky and completely unpredictable organ. She had also given me a referral to a psychologist and a neurologist who she had worked with in Los Angeles; I went to see them and was told essentially the same thing – memory restoration after amnesia has no real set pattern or time frame.

In mid-October, in an attempt to give myself something to do, I had decided to take it upon myself to throw the "legendary" Bartowski Halloween party that Ellie was no longer around to oversee. It surprised me to learn that I apparently have a knack for party planning – and if I continue finding myself with a need for something to fill my life, I might just consider doing it professionally.

I had a whole list of things that I needed to accomplish the day of the party. First among them: find myself a slave Princess Leia outfit. I might not be able to remember having dressed up like that, but I HAD seen the picture of me wearing it from Halloween 2007, and I figured it might be a nice surprise for Chuck if I wore it.

Also… I felt like I was ready to be intimate with Chuck again. I had tried to suggest it a few times over the last month, but he is just too much of a gentleman. Thus, I decided that perhaps more active measures were in order, among those active measures being the Princess Leia bikini.

Unfortunately, around mid-afternoon, I found myself running behind. It had taken me somewhat longer than I had expected to find the Princess Leia bikini, and while I was getting things done, there was no way I was going to be able to get to the last task on my list. So I called Chuck.

"Hey, I need you to swing by the dry cleaner on the way home," I told him.

"_Not a problem,_" he said. "_What am I picking up?_"

"Just the Shai-Hulud costume," I said. "It smelled incredibly bad, and I figured that if you and Morgan wanted to wear it, you probably didn't want to be smelling its stink all night."

Chuck didn't say anything. "Chuck, is that alright? Can you do that?"

"_How did you know about the Shai-Hulud?_"

I frowned. How DID I know about the Shai-Hulud? For that matter, how did I know it was CALLED that? "Uh… didn't you tell me?"

"_Sarah, I haven't worn the Shai-Hulud for Halloween in five years. I haven't even thought about it in almost as long_." I could practically hear the grin in his voice. "_You must have remembered it!_"

And I'll tell you what. The sheer joy of having my memory start to restore itself again after so many months, the release of the frustration… well, let's just say that Chuck got lucky that night. VERY lucky.

Three times.


End file.
